Conlang Year 2025 — Days 10-12
This is another series of days that I am combining, which henceforth shall be called “Consonant Day.” According to the prompts, these days task you to “choose series of consonants to incorporate, decide whether consonants will have a voicing distinction, and research other places of articulations.” Conlang Year is set up to give the participant plenty of time to do research and gauge what sorts of elements that they wish to include in their language, which is an excellent feature for beginner conlangers. On the flip side, I really enjoy creating phonologies for languages that may never occur, just as some practice to see how the values lie, whether it could be a potential language to explore.
The phonology for this language is one I made in one of these experimentation sessions with not really an expectation, but it’s one that I latched onto and one I wanted to save for specifically this. I’ll present my thought process over these three days and present the vowels on Day 15.
I start all my shit-shooting (that is literally what the folder is called where these are birthed) with this template system starts:
I started by editing out some of the less common phonemes, because for this one, a minimal phonology was desired. The affricates were gutted and the dental, lateral alveolar, palatal, and uvular consonants were nearly completely removed, sparing the glide /j/. The velar nasal /ŋ/ was, unfortunately, among the consonant crew that was cut. It’s less common than the others present, especially in word initial forms.
Generally, I did not want a voicing distinction: too many consonants. The voiceless ones were chosen since it is uncommon for there to be only voiced consonants in natural languages. For the bilabial fricative, however, the voiced fricatve /v/ was elected over the voiceless one /f/.
When it comes to other articulations, the alveolar approximant, or the rhotic in this case, is shown here as a trill /r/, yet I wanted to weaken that a little more to the tap /ɾ/. As @quothalinguist had mentioned, the sound /w/ is a coarticulated labial-velar sound. The velar column was expanded to include the labialized velar stop /kʷ/. With that expansion, the consonant chart is complete!
